May 24, 2010 10:34 PM UTC

So, About That Palin Endorsement...

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• by: Colorado Pols

You all remember what the Denver Post’s Allison Sherry wrote a week ago:

GOP Senate hopeful Ken Buck said Monday he thought it would be “rude” for Sarah Palin to steal the limelight from the state GOP assembly when she comes to Denver for a talk Saturday evening, where she is rumored to be officially endorsing his opponent Jane Norton. [Pols emphasis]

The word that former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was going to endorse Jane Norton–on the day of the GOP state convention Norton had earlier abandoned–spread far and wide after Palin’s visit to Colorado was announced. And that wasn’t an accident: sources close to Norton’s campaign were by all accounts the ones spreading the rumor. And then at some point late last week…that began to change.

So what happened between then and Saturday evening? The Colorado Independent reports:

Palin was expected to endorse Norton. She had mentioned Norton at an event in Washington earlier in the week and, because Norton opted not to participate in the state’s GOP delegate assembly Saturday, the timing of the Palin speech suggested some coordination with the Norton campaign. An endorsement Saturday night at the event in Denver would have diluted the power of the victory Buck won at the assembly in Loveland earlier in the day. Indeed, Buck was perhaps the star of the show at the assembly, winning a whopping 76 percent of the delegate votes and the confidence of activist voters who had packed into the Budweiser Center from all over the state. The absent Palin endorsement in Denver leaves Norton with nothing to take from the GOPs biggest political weekend of the year, her candidacy now clearly struggling.

Norton reportedly met with Palin earlier in the day and sat in the middle of the third row in front of the stage at the Magness Center. But Palin didn’t acknowledge Norton, or Buck, who was also in attendance, or any other state politicians.

The emerging story as we understand it is pretty simple: Palin was fully prepared to come to Colorado Saturday and spike Ken Buck’s momentum coming out of the state convention by endorsing Norton. But just like we saw with the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee getting burned for trying to clear the field for Norton last fall, even Sarah Palin’s mythological status on the right was not enough to keep her above reproach from local conservatives flocking to Ken Buck’s standard–in fact, Palin’s endorsement of Norton was becoming more likely to harm Palin’s own credibility with the local and national “Tea Party” movement than anything else, as other less-conservative primary endorsements by Palin have recently done.

And just like that, the punch was pulled. The new rumor is that an endorsement of Norton by Palin is still likely at a less pressurized moment, and if that’s true still might prove a net positive for Norton with conservatives she must back from Buck by August: but it’s increasingly clear that this trip to Colorado didn’t work out the way Palin (or Norton) wanted.